Laurence Vance quotes wise words from Thomas Fleming in the new issue of Chronicles. It’s worth mentioning that the context of Fleming’s remarks is two letters attempting to take him to task for saying that the federal government should butt out of the Terri Schiavo affair. One of the correspondents says that he was similarly dismayed by Fleming’s position on sending Elian Gonzales back to his father in Cuba — Fleming was for it. Fleming is, of course, right on both counts: the federal government has no business overturning the laws of Florida and overruling the next-of-kin in the Schiavo affair, and a boy belongs with his father even if his father lives under a Communist state.

The Senate is proposing a constitutional amendment to prohibit blasphemy — that is, flag-burning, blasphemy against the one true all-American faith, “our nation and its values.” The Washington Post reports:

Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) cast the debate in loftier terms. “Many Americans have come to see the flag as a sacred symbol of our nation and its values,” he said. “Those who dislike American values have the right to express their opinions even when they are offensive. But I do not believe that the right to desecrate a symbol like our flag belongs in the same category.”

I read that shortly after reading this passage from John Lukacs’s The End of the Twentieth Century and the End of the Modern World:

The great threat to religious faith in our time (more precisely, to the quality and meaning of faith) is populist nationalism. The democratization of the churches has led to that; but that is only a secondary consequence, inseparable from the democratization of entire societies. The primary element is simpler, and more important. It is that the religion of the nation, the sentimental symbols of the nation, are more powerful than religious faith, especially when they are commingled. Nationalism, I repeat, is the only popular religio (religio: binding belief) [legally binding, if Frist and the Republicans get their way — DM] in our times.

… When in the 1950s I asked my then orthodox and rigidly catechized American Catholic students, “Are you an American who happens to be a Catholic, or are you a Catholic who happens to be an American?” all of them chose the former, not the latter.

There is a note of sadness here, for Wood seems to believe that our present political habits would appall his gentlemen revolutionists. In their view, if republicanism was to gain a foothold in a world hostile to it, the great danger was the tendency of a polity to gravitate toward the "fiscal/military state": a style familiar in that monarchical world. Such states made war to justify standing armies, maintained armies to excuse high taxation, and generated bloated public debts to attach influential creditors to them. Sound dangerously familiar?

That probably sounds, if anything, dangerously unpatriotic to the good Americans who read The Weekly Standard. Aren't we the arsenal of democracy, after all?

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